A 30-year-old Small Action Team (SAT) jawan from Gumla died on his way to Medica Hospital in Ranchi on Tuesday after sustaining severe injuries in an IED blast triggered by the outlawed CPI (Maoist) group at a dense jungle under the Serengdag police station area of Lohardaga district, about 75 Kilometers Northwest of Ranchi.
Duleshwar Paras, who was airlifted by an Indian Airforce chopper from the jungle in Lohardaga and brought to Ranchi for treatment, succumbed to his injuries after landing at the State helipad at Khelgaon, from where he was taken to Bhagwan Mahavir Medica Superspecialty Hospital by road and the doctors declared him “brought dead”.
Later in the day, Chief Minister Hemant Soren paid a floral tribute to the martyred soldier at JAP-1 ground in Ranchi. SAT are small teams of district police personnel formed in each district to fight Left Wing Extremism (LWE) and run special operations against the rebel outfits, police sources said.
Duleshwar’s last rites will be performed with State honour at his native place in Gumla, police sources said.
Duleshwar, police said, was a part of a joint operation of SAT 3 and Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) against the CPI (Maoist) rebels, who are said to be active in suburban Lohardaga and neighbouring Gumla. No other casualty has been reported from the site of the encounter so far.
Sources said that the Improvised Explosive Device (IED) got triggered after Duleshwar stepped on it during the operation. He lost one of his legs in the explosion. His fellow soldiers, sources said, took a profusely bleeding Duleshwar to a safe place in the encounter site to save his life. Later, he was airlifted to Ranchi.
“The IED was a pressure bomb, which got triggered with the Jawan’s body weight once he stepped on it. He was conscious but he had lost a lot of blood because of the injuries in his legs,” said a CRPF official.
CRPF officials said that the combing operations were on at the neighbouring areas of Lohardaga and Gumla from Sunday. The security forces had received intelligence inputs that dreaded Maoist leader Ravinder Ganju, who has a bounty of Rs.10 lakh on his head, and other members of his team were active in the region.
As per figures with the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), at least 19 of 24 districts in Jharkhand are LWE-affected. Besides the CPI (Maoist), there are more than 17 splinter outfits operating in various districts of Jharkhand, say police.